Kurrently in Kibana: Planning for Kibana 4.2

Like the rest of the Elastic engineering team, the Kibana gang gathered for nearly a week of food, fun (a.k.a. beer) and, shockingly, a bit of work too. Let's be honest, not much code got written, and not many pulls were merged, but we did get some important face to face
shoutingdrinkinghuggingdecision making done.

Planning for Kibana 4.2

Four dot
two you say? What happened to Kibana 4.1? It's in progress as we speak. We've been hard at work on Kibana 4.1 since before Kibana 4.0 GA dropped. If you're interested in Kibana 4.1's key features check out the Kibana 4.1 issues on Github. That said, we always have our eye on tomorrow to confirm the decisions we make today, so we took the opportunity to nail down the Kibana 4.2 feature set while we were all together in Mountain View, California. So whats up with Kibana 4.2? The big stuff includes:

A startup page

Kibana currently waits for Elasticsearch to startup before it starts up, however it doesn't make the Kibana web server available until the Elasticsearch startup process is done. We think the better bet is to show you what we're waiting on, and why, in the browser. So we're designing a startup status page for Kibana that will be available even when Elasticsearch isn't.

Document CSV export

We're taking export beyond the chart! Kibana 4.2 will allow for exporting documents from Elasticsearch in a columnized CSV perfect for importing into spread sheets or munging with with command line tools.

Authentication

We're building a lightweight authentication framework with session support. This will allow for functionality such as logout and timeout, even when paired with HTTP basic auth in Elasticsearch. We plan to build this in an expandable fashion to allow for authenticating against custom services. In the first phase this will be limited to authentication, we plan in the future to allow for permissions on individual dashboards and other stored resources.

Log event context extraction

When you've finally found that one log you need, you often need to know how it got there. Often you need to see the logs around that log, and Kibana 4.2 will enable that.

And oh so much more

Oh, also a Zero

In addition to planning 4.2, we also planned 4.0.2, our next bug fix release. While there's no major bugs, we're always looking to fix the little things. Our prime method of this is the end-of-the week party we shamelessly cribbed from the Elasticsearch team called Fix It Friday. Every Friday we siege the living day lights out of the easily squash-able bugs, small feature requests and well scoped pull requests so they don't get lost in the noise and get the attention they deserve.

And more!

What else have we been up to in the last few days? All of this jazz is in the master branch right now. You'll find it all in upcoming releases! Here's a few of the highlights:

Bubble charts!

This allows for sizing the dots in a line chart according to the result of a metric aggregation, effectively adding another visual dimension. We also enabled the disabling of the connecting lines.

_timestamp in tables

Until a few days ago, _timestamp was available for aggregations but not for viewing. Thats fixed now, along with a bug that could cause changes to the metaFields parameter to be ignored.

ACE editor in the object editor

We actually intended to have this, but it was excluded from the build. This allows for nicely formatted JSON in the stored object editor.

Highlighting for multi-field mappings (e.g., .raw)

In previous versions highlighting was not supported for fields that don't actually exist in _source. That's no longer the case, we make a run at highlighting everything possible now, even logstash's .raw fields.

Decimals in the range aggregation

In some browsers type=number was being treated as only whole numbers. We fixed that.

More Next Week

As you may have seen, we're now publishing weekly updates on Elasticsearch and Apache Lucene, Logstash and Kibana. We'll bring you the latest and greatest in next week's Kurrently in Kibana.